Thursday, September 20, 2012

Joe tells us that the only time he was ever taken out of
school was when the podpinki (buttons/stumpers/honey mushroom/Armellaria

mellea) were in season.He, his dad and grandfather would go cut banana
boxes full of podpinki and jam them into the back of the family station wagon. They’d arrive home as if fresh off a bank heist!
His mom would be faced with hours of cleaning and canning mushrooms (isn’t it
much more fun to be the forager than the kitchen drudge?).This might be the reason that spring is her
favorite time of year.﻿﻿

Here is an Armellaria species, just one of at least a dozen very similar species grouped together and labeled by mushroom hunters as "Honey Mushrooms," or as in Joe's example above, "podpinki." Do you have any tales about picking Armellaria? If so let us know in the comments section below.

Armellaria infrequently fruit on shiitake logs but ...even so, you should know what they are in case they make a showing! Identifiers: often clustered, growing in fall on wood, buff/brownish/yellow, often sticky caps with a bristling of short "hairs" on the top of the cap. Gills are attached, cream colored, and covered with a fibrous or webby "skirt" which becomes the ring on the stem as the mushroom grows. Spore print white.

There is no need to go foraging beyond your backyard if you
are growing shiitake mushrooms. Yes, this is IT…Shiitake time! Shiitake have
two general fruiting times when there is almost nothing you can do to stop the
fruiting impulse…Fall, and (to a lesser degree), Spring. Planting a mix of
different strains will help stretch out the season, but the combination of
temperature change, rainfall and humidity after a long hot summer can mean
grocery sacks full of mushrooms.

On our farm, we finished up a week or so ago with a nice
natural flush of mushrooms from logs planted with Wide Range strains. Now the
logs planted with Warm Weather strains, especially WW70, (a vigorous fall
fruiter), are bumpy with mushrooms. We had our first fall frost two nights ago so
we await with pleasure the prospect of harvesting the gorgeous Cold Weather shiitake.

﻿﻿﻿

WW70 is a star early fall fruiter.

﻿﻿﻿Good shiitake fruiting goes hand and hand with rain, so we
are often faced with black brown, water logged caps. Mushrooms like this have a
much shorter shelf life than properly harvested shiitake, really no more than a
week. Plus, their dark shiny appearance scares customers if the mushrooms are
taken to market. It is best to avoid this problem by watching for the earliest
stages of fruiting, and covering the pinning (baby mushrooms) logs with
fruiting blanket, frost blanket or clear plastic until the mushrooms are ready
to harvest. Even if you can cover the wet but still developing mushrooms a few
days before the cap starts to pull away from the stipe (stem), they should
develop beautifully for a high quality product at picking time.

Sometimes you just can’t get the logs covered in time
though. Water saturated mushrooms are just fine to eat unless they have
developed a dark brown cast to the gills (meaning rot). Saturated mushrooms can
be dried, but be careful not to overload drying trays. Monitor heat and air
flow as these easily get past their prime before they fully dry. Our favorite
way to preserve is to slice and sauté until the extra water releases and
evaporates. Season the slices to taste and freeze pints or puree and pack into
ice cube trays for later when the fine memories of the fall harvest are equal
to the taste of fresh-frozen shiitake.

Pine squirrels are just as likely to snack on
football Sundays as are local cheeseheads. Covering fruiting logs helps reduce
obvious bite marks in prime specimines.

Just now, after years of hearing the tales of podpinik
hunting, Joe tells me that the underlying reason for going mushroom hunting was
the side trip to the White River in Waushara County, WI…for fishing. Figures!﻿﻿

2 comments:

Great shots. Confession: I've always been nervous about mushroom foraging, though I have eaten puffballs from the wild (well, not really wild - they were growing in my front yard). I'm seriously considering trying a straw-bale oyster experiment soon.

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Welcome to the official blog of Field & Forest Products. For those of you who are unfamiliar with our company; we have been in the mushroom business for 34 years. As a mail-order business, we cultivate and sell organic mushrooms and mushroom spawn. Located in Northeastern Wisconsin, our small family owned business is constantly growing. This blog was created with the hope that people get to know not only the business, but also the people behind it.